Thankfully

Thankfully, it is not difficult for me to answer the question, "What are you thankful for?". A great many of us will answer that question today with words like 'good health', 'family' and 'a roof over our heads', but what of those who struggle to make even these meager claims? In my heart I know that today is for those souls, the ones who are not be able to answer such a question with warmth, joy and hope in their voices. Today, I'll think of them as I count my many good fortunes.

I am grateful for insulin and the people who continue to work on ways to make it better

A family that buys me a silly hat to wear when I make them special meals

My wife's strength and patients

My son's heart, my daughter's spirit

A warm home

My mother, brothers and extended family

Health, happiness and the staggeringly amazing diabetes community

I am thankful that the people who make up Spry Publishing let me write books... their kindness rescued my love for thinking

I'm thankful for all of you and I wonder if you understand how much helping you... helps me

Of all the things that I listed and all of the things that I didn't but could have, if you made me choose just one. If I had to tell you that I was thankful for one thing and that my gratitude meant that the rest of it would magically disappear, I'd choose insulin. None of these things would exist in my life if there were no insulin. 

Without insulin, I'd be too sad to think, love, find friends or care about the world around me. Insulin is everything, it's what I am grateful and thankful for. In it's absences, I would be the one of the people who struggle today to find a warm word of thanks. 

Think of those people today. May you share this day, and each that follows with your family, in a way that brings honor to those who weren't lucky enough to live in a time when their "insulin" existed.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving!

Best,

Scott

Oh Canada... It's DexCom time!

The DexCom G4 continuous glucose monitor is now available in the true north! I'm not exactly sure how DexCom got their device ready for sale in Canada. Perhaps the transmitter will be wearing a tiny little hockey sweater? Who knows...

Getting started looks pretty straightforward. Go to dexcom.com/en-ca and then click "Contact Distributor". The link takes you to www.animas.ca, the company that is handling the distribution for Canada. The Animas page doesn't have any DexCom specific links. I would use the "Contact Us" tab at the top right of the Animas page and ask how to get started.

I found this contact information for Animas Canada at the bottom of the Canadian DexCom page linked above.

Local Dexcom Distributor

Animas Canada

200 Whitehall Drive

Markham, Ontario

L3R0T5

General inquiries: 1-855-293-5083 or 

CustomerCare@Animas.ca

Product support: 1-866-406-4844

I'm so excited for my Canadian friends, you are going to love having a CGM!

And the winner is: Diabetes Circle Laces

Arden picks the winner of our Diabetes Circles Shoe Laces giveaway...

Thank you to everyone for sharing and entering!

Prep Pad

So there I was, surfing the Interwebs, and I saw this video...

Introducing Prep Pad from The Orange Chef Company on Vimeo.

I was intrigued, and so I set out to learn more. My advanced Googling skills quickly led me to The Orange Chef, makers of the Prep Pad. I watched a few more videos, read about the product, and decided that it may be a huge leap in how I count carbohydrates for Arden. A few phone calls later, the makers are sending me a scale so I can give it a try and write a review.

The review unit should be arriving at my house in about two weeks, then I'll put the scale through it's paces and let you know what I learn. 

Based what I've seen and the conversation that I had with Michael from The Orange Chef, I'm more than excited to see what it can do. 

This is just the tip of what Michael says the Prep Pad can do but... Imagine you make a dish at home, just enter the ingredients as you go and the scale (In conjunction with it's companion iPad app) retrieves a bevy of nutritional information about your concoction - and it saves the information so that the next time you make the dish, all you have to do is call it up, weigh your serving, and the carb count is at your finger tips. This thing may completely change how we count carbs in our home cooked meals. Fingers crossed. 

This is not a paid review. I'm not receiving a free unit... I just thought that if the Prep Pad works as advertised, it may really help a lot of people who count carbs everyday. We'll find out soon.

I feel like a Jerk...

I've started this post and deleted it maybe a dozen times this year, always afraid that I'll come off like I'm complaining, ungrateful, greedy or worse - a jerk. Today, I'm not going to delete it because something I recently read has given me the nerve to ask.

So, if you'll be kind enough to indulge my brooding artistic side, I have a question for all of you about my first world problem that I can't shake caring about. It's a question that I'm embarrassed to need the answer to and I'm almost certain that there is no way for me to say what I'm about to..... See, right now I'm having the strongest desire to delete this, I hate that I want to ask, it makes me feel so... I can't put it into words.

Okay. When I began writing Arden's Day six years ago I didn't really know about blogs. There was no DOC that I was aware of and my sharing was mostly a catharsis, as I didn't expect anyone to see it. I only ever shared the link (Which wasn't ArdensDay.com) with close friends and family. This blog acted as a writing class for me, it helped me to express feelings that I would have otherwise kept locked up and I still furrow my brow and wonder how this all happened when I receive a monthly report of the site's traffic. To say that I didn't expect any of this, is an understatement of epic proportions.

I did however always want to tell stories, I just never thought they would be real stories. I wanted to write fiction, but this form of expression seems to have found me and I know now that I'm meant to share from my heart, not my imagination. Fast forward a few hundred blog entries and now the DOC exists and bloggers are getting noticed, some even get asked to write books. Other's good fortune presented me with an opportunity to speak directly with a publisher, who only knows me as a diabetes blogger. That woman wasn't talking to me because she wanted me to write, she called me because I forgot to include a bio line for a sidebar that I contributed to a book she was publishing. This was the chanciest meeting of chance meetings, it never should have happened, I never should have been on the phone with this person - but I was, and so I acted. I idiotically pitched my idea for a parenting memoir to a publisher of medical books, because why not? Because, when was I ever going to get this chance again? 

Writing the book took forever. Handing it in was one of the most stressful things that I've ever done. I feared that no one would like it, that it wouldn't pass muster, that I was about to embarrass myself in a way that I couldn't bounce back from - but the risk seemed worth it, I wanted to tell a story. Writing was personally difficult, handing the book in was an exercise in humility but when the book was well-received... I couldn't believe it. I doubted myself as a writer even as glowing reviews were filling my inbox.

My first published work has been on shelves for almost eight months, it's won a writing award and I still, I doubt myself everyday when I write. It can be an email, a blog post, social media message, doesn't matter - I doubt every word. That doubt has stopped me from asking you the question that I've wanted to ask for almost a year. Then I read this recent review of my book...

"I've just spent the last 6 hours or so reading what I consider to be one of the best non-fiction books ever written. Once I opened it up and began reading, I couldn't put it down until I reached the end - even while I was cooking my dinner I had it in my hand. What an absolute pleasure to read. I don’t think I can put into words just how much I enjoyed this book."

Those wonderful words that the reader used empowered me, though not for the reason you may imagine. I didn't read it and suddenly stop doubting my writing, I may always do that. I read her words, and they desperately made me desire for other people to feel the way that she did. Her reaction is why I wanted to write the book, it's why I wrote as a child, and why I write this blog. I've always wanted others to see life through my eyes, if only for a moment. 

I elude to my question a lot. I try to find ways to lead you, images, tweets, drawing attention to reviews, but I've never been able to just ask... until now. Because, why not? That attitude won me the chance to write a book and I'm hoping that it will give me a chance to help more people to find it. So here's my question, and please know that I ask it with great respect and a sincere amount of humility.

Would you please read my book?

Starting this Monday, I'm going to post daily, a different review of my book, 'Life Is Short, Laundry Is Eternal' on my social media pages. My publisher tells me that people don't buy parenting themed books from October to January (Talk about market research, huh?) but I want to try and change that line of thinking. In honesty, I want other people to feel my story because I think it's all of our stories. Even more honestly, I want to write again and help other people to access those emotions. In the world of publishing, there is only one thing that will get me to that place - If you read the Life Is Short and enjoyed it, please tell a friend, give it as a holiday gift and leave a review online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes. If you haven't read it, please pick a copy and give it it try.

Well, I feel insanely uneasy about posting this but... dammit she read the book while she was making dinner.

I hope that you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving, I'll be taking a break from blogging next week so I can prep for the holiday and do some non-diabetes related writing- but I'll be back soon! Thank you all so much for reading Arden's Day, it's a the pleasure of a lifetime to speak with you in this intimate setting.

If you have time, can I ask you to answer just a handful of fast question so that I can understand better how the book, is or isn't finding it's way in the world. Anonymously of course. 

Best,

Scott